Start at the core

A couple of days back on Medium, Atom is just “UX-ing” banking. Mondo is re-imagining it:

Disrupting finance shouldn’t be that difficult. All it takes is a ruthless focus on solving customers problems rather than selling them a product.

29 January 2016. Over on the a16z podcastWhen banking works like my smartphone. Taavet Hinrikus, CEO and co-founder of TransferWise, says:

Purely by putting on some make up and a better front end you can’t offer a fundamentally better service.

Last October. Jon Stein of United States based start-up Betterment was saying:

I think there has been a general lack of imagination about how far technology can go to deliver better financial advice. These are very early days for automated investing. It was through seeing bad practices in the financial industry and through my own struggles using the tools that existed that I thought there really ought to be a better way. There should be a more obvious answer to ‘What should I do with my money’.

First and foremost the credit card was designed to make money for banks, and everything about their design betrays that primary objective. Credit cards don’t have to be complicated, they don’t have to trick you, but they do, because they were designed that way.

If parts of an industry that designed the credit card realises this opportunity to do something better for the user, well, so should anyone else offering a service, in ways that go beyond just being “an internet bank” like First Direct and Smile did at the turn of the century.

TL;DR: Go right inside to the root, to the problem, and work inside out.